The Dead Boyfriend

Oh, yes, you saw the title, and you know I’m back with more R.L. Stine. I’m actually pretty mad at myself because I realized that this is number five of the Fear Street relaunch and I missed number four! Thank goodness for my Kindle, because I can have it within second and then I’ll finish it in hours.

R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series is back, and in The Dead Boyfriend, he tells the frightening tale of teenage love – and how it can do terribly, murderously wrong.Caitlyn has never had a real boyfriend before. When she starts seeing Blade, she throws herself into the relationship with fervor. She ignores her friends who warn her that Blade may be a phony and that she is taking the whole thing too seriously. Caitlyn is smitten. She doesn’t care if she loses her friends. All she wants is Blade. When Caitlyn approaches Blade with another girl, she completely loses it. She snaps. Everything goes red. When she comes back to her senses, she realizes that Blade is dead – and she has killed him.But if Blade is dead, how is he staring at her across a crowded party? Okay, that’s the synopsis from Goodreads, and I fixed it to include the fact that Blade is Blade and not Colin, and Caitlin is Caitlyn. Also, I love the fact that R.L. Stine was like, yes, I’ll name him Colin, oh wait, it’s going to presses? Okay, Blade it is!

I’m pretty sure my last post summed up my gushing adoration for R.L. Stine and his Fear Street books, so we can sidestep that this time.

Poor little Caitlyn. All she wants is to spend every waking moment with her new boyfriend Blade, and her friends are telling her silly things like, slow down! or, maybe you should get to know this guy before you jump into a relationship with him. No way, says Caitlyn! I love him and he loves me! We’re going grocery shopping together! But when she spots him with another girl, Caitlyn kind of loses it and ends up stabbing him multiple times. When Deena Fear {yes, a FEAR, and an absolutely psycho one at that, and I love her with my whole heart} says that she can get Blade to come to Caitlyn {er…and Deena, too}, Caitlyn doesn’t know if she wants that. Blade could come back and start pointing fingers or he could, in Deena’s daydream, drop Caitlyn forever and be with Deena, because, you know, she saw him first.

As a former teenager, I connect with this on a deep level. I’m being serious. For me in high school, I thought I was going to marry my boyfriend. We got together and three weeks in, I broke up with him because I honest to god thought to myself, is this someone you could see spending the rest of your life with?

Like, what? Bree, sweetheart, get a grip.

But when you’re fifteen and the guy is super cute, you do think things like that. {PS, we stayed together all through high school and then broke up my senior year. It’s okay, my boyfriend now is way cuter, which is all that matters, right?} This book just takes it to the extreme. Caitlyn goes a bit nuts when she sees Blade with a new girl and {spoiler alert} most of the stabbing isn’t her fault. Wait, is it really a spoiler when that doesn’t seem to make any sense? I guess?

I understand a lot of the reviews on Goodreads. The ending is a typical R.L. Stine ending: what the heck just happened, and why can’t I find out the rest? But I love that. I love those horror movies where the ending is open, but you know that there won’t be another one because the director or writer or whoever doesn’t do sequels. It opens up your imagination to the endless possibilities of what could happen, and I think that’s the best.

A lot of people also said that they would love this book if they were younger or whatever. I gave this book five stars because it made me remember what it was like reading at a younger age. If this was a book by someone else that I had stumbled across in a bookstore? Yeah, I probably wouldn’t have rated it so high. But because it’s R.L. Stine and I knew what to expect from one of his stories and I knew that I would recapture that whimsical feeling of reading an “older” book when I was much younger than the characters…yeah, that totally deserves five stars in my book.

Is this book a masterpiece set for the Pulitzer Prize? No. But is it a fun, slightly scary distraction from life? Heck yes, and that is something that I DESPERATELY needed this week. So if you pass one of the Fear Street relaunch books in your library and you remember what it was like to go into the bookstore of your choice {Crown Books for me, where I later ended up getting my first job}, bypass the kids’ section because you were ~*too cool*~, and then spend hours in front of the young adult books that you knew your parents would frown at {but buy you one anyway because they’re awesome like that}, then grab it. Grab it, read it in a few hours, and remember what it’s like to be a kid again.